Monday, February 7, 2011

Denton: Fake news. I don't mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn't new at all. The state won't go bankrupt. The product isn't revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news. Of course the public knows that most of these stories are published for the massaging of sources -- and that's why they don't read them.

What's news? Online, at least, we have the numbers. So we know that few people care about the twists and turns of state legislation, for instance -- or about product announcements from any company other than Apple. So we have no excuse. I'm on a jihad within Gawker against fake news. Unless the twin towers are falling or Brett Favre actually sent the cock shot, it probably isn't news.

I learned the news business in the UK, in which newspaper political coverage is much like cable TV news in the US. Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted -- until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning. You really might as well wait for a weekly like the Economist to tell you what the net position is at the end of the week.

To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it's frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I'd much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you're going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don't pretend you're providing news. That's not news.

1 comment:

I've worked in TV news for two decades now. Worst trend? YouTube (cats singing Jingle Bells, every Xmas...jeez!). Worst offence? Assuming that everything found online is free (thanks, Google!). Live (Happening Now) News? With no context, no analysis, no focus, and no conclusion, live news is often confusing and ultimately irrelevant. A short news story that is well written and edited will always be better than ten hours of live broadcasting of waiting for something to happen. At the end of the day, what happened in Egypt was a coup d'etat, even though everyone's hailing it as a popular revolution. Yeah, right...